Guns have been much on the minds of folks in the greater Kansas City area for the last couple of weeks. We’ve been going through a two-month string of shootings on area highways, now apparently ended with an arrest last Thursday night, and last Sunday’s killings in the parking lots of a Jewish community center and a Jewish retirement home by an anti-Semitic white supremacist. Further west, there’s the standoff in Nevada over unpaid grazing fees between the Bureau of Land Management and a freeloading, gunwaving wacko and his gunwaving wacko friends in the various militia movements, cheered on by folks like Sean Hannity.

What will it take to end the stranglehold that the blind worship of guns has on our culture?

The Tar Sands Blockade of TransCanada Corporation’s “Keystone XL South” continues in Texas, but former members of the Clinton and George W. Bush cabinets believe the northern half will soon be green-lighted by President Barack Obama.

In a Nov. 13 conference call led by the Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA), an oil and gas industry front group, CEA Counsel John Northington said he believes a “Keystone XL North” rubber stamp is in the works by the Obama Administration.

“I think the Keystone will be approved in fairly short order by the administration,” Northington said on the call.

Remember Tim DeChristopher? He’s the University of Utah student who last December gave us all an early Christmas present when he wrapped up 22,000 acres of our Federal land, thus protecting it from Bushie auction to Big Carbon. Tim showed up at Bush’s “last great gift to oil and gas”, the Bureau of Land Management’s giveaway auction in Utah, where he entered the high bid on almost one-sixth of the public land at risk.